I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

…but I see at least five ways that the Feds could break this “Dark Market” successor-to-Silk-Road distributed-network online-black-marketplace thingy*. Which probably means that the FBI has figured out a dozen. Heck, I’m assuming that the FBI isn’t behind this thing in the first place. Guess we’ll see, huh?

Moe Lane

PS: Of course I’m not going to tell you what those ways are. What makes you think that I want pedophiles and hard drug dealers to have a secure market experience?

3 Comments

Oh, yeah, everything is eventually defeat-able, but that’s not the point, really. The point is that it raises the cost of general surveillance high enough to make the Feds need to have a specific reason to break it, but only if enough legitimate traffic runs on it to make the illegitimate traffic on it noise.

Yeah, I kinda get a similar feeling about this. Remember people on the left use the arguement that “it’s to protect the children,” to try make it so people can’t own guns. Heck they even gave guns to Mexican drug cartels to try to create a crisis to ram through gun control…
–
Seriously, they really don’t need to hack into entire networks to catch a child trafficking ring, they only need to catch one member in the ring and then start backtracing IP addresses from that one person’s computer(not sure all the tactics they can use to do this, but you get the point).
–
Seriously, considering people are talking about this encryption/browser/whatever on wired.com indicates that there are people that are using it for reasons that would be considered to be legit. Maybe they are simply using it because their identity got stolen once and they don’t want it to happen again.
–
In any case, since this is being advertised on wired.com, I don’t think the developers intended for this to be used to further organized crime.

The design (and I make no representation that I’ve looked at the engineering of it at all) seems to be for a generalized peer-to-peer shopping network with no central authority other than a widely-shared data set (the Bitcoin blockchain, plus some other stuff). It’s like ebay without ebay.com. They added some interesting twists in third-party arbiters and multiagent cryptography, among others, but all it really does is allow buyers and sellers who already kind of know each other to perform transactions through the Internet.
.
The social structures that would make this an effective black market (or white market, for that matter – this would work equally well as a better form of Craigslist) are largely left as an exercise to the student. They also haven’t integrated any anonymity or dealt with the very real problem that shipping physical stuff is still the “analog hole” of black marketeering.
.
Silk Road was a large-scale illicit marketplace operated by a small number of people. You could build Silk Road inside of Dark Market, and you’d have to if you wanted the same scale and access between customers and sellers. And as soon as you did, the FBI could bring it all right down again.